Meaning shifting, the arena set for another drama. Sade moving there, Mirbeau, Genet, others follow soaring far above the social realm. Seeking truth in the destruction for the love of death - an Ethic of perversity. Chinese extravagance, contraptions of death and pain amidst an orgy of flowers. Death of a hundred cuts, the executioner a virtuoso of torment and preservation of life, with his knives and spears a sculptor of flesh and skin, modelling the human body into something different, changing a figure wrought by nature into one of his own liking, heightening its being through pain. Penal colonies. Flogged with red-hot metal whips, burning into the flesh, left in there to cool within the healing wound, retracted then and heated up again. Now, the colonial wars of the 19th century introduced on the one hand the almost abstract scale of mass extinction but also channelled that same colourful display of primal violence and passionate cruelty right into the heart of darkness. Resurgence outside the legal system. Torture becoming the domain of the individual, a vehicle of individual self-realization. Shifting also the superficial raison d'être, confession no longer but information, motive almost only instrumental, mere self-preservatory measures of state, an extension of war. The spiritual dimension of reconsiliation in pain hidden deep within the individual, much more intriguing so, no reference to law, positive point of departure for state and constitution, application at the discretion of individuals struggling with the restraints of morality. "Engine of the state, not of law".